Sawmills.ai
Designing an Observability Platform from 0→1
Turning an engineering-built observability control plane into a coherent product customers could configure, understand, and operate.
A control-plane experience for managing telemetry on the desktop, paired with qualified insights delivered to owners.
The problem
Telemetry was growing faster than teams could govern it.
DevOps teams needed control over telemetry cost, cardinality, and compliance without slowing delivery—but the product made those risks hard to see.
- Reduce spend without losing signal
- Control cardinality and compliance risk
- Debug pipeline behavior quickly
Before state - Sawmills, July 2024
Early concepts covered the right jobs, but the product model and interaction patterns had not yet converged.
Finding the product
Defining the Minimum Lovable Product.
Six-plus interviews with platform and observability engineers surfaced three jobs: reduce spend, keep the signal, and debug faster. With a tight runway and limited access to design partners, I scoped the smallest coherent loop that could prove value in weeks—not quarters.
This MLP became the organizing model for navigation, workflows, and launch scope.
The launch experience
Three journeys defined the product.
Connect and route. Understand and improve. Operate safely.
01
Connect and route
The pipeline became the product’s mental model: sources, shared processing, and destination-specific processing.
02
Understand and improve
Insights showed where volume and cost accumulated. Processors turned those findings into action.
03
Operate safely
A saved configuration was not always live. The UI showed desired state, deployment progress, failure impact, and actual telemetry.
Founding-designer operating model
Building the foundation while shipping.
Three months in, with one front-end engineer and no dedicated PM beyond the CPO, I migrated the product screen by screen while creating a lightweight design system around what we shipped.
- Migrate screen by screen; keep backend APIs unchanged
- Adopt Ant Design to ship common components without building each from scratch
- Create custom components, icons, and illustrations for Sawmills workflows
- Codify reusable layouts, interactions, system states, and keyboard navigation
A shared visual and interaction language made pipelines, insights, and processors feel like one product—and gave the team reusable building blocks for what came next.
Outcomes
A coherent product shipped—and customers could use it.
PUBLIC LAUNCH
Feb 19, 20250→1 product launchCOMMERCIAL VALIDATION
8 paying customersAt launch · shaped with 5 design partnersTIME TO VALUE
≈ 5 minutesFirst pipeline · design partners, n=5We’ve gone from chasing engineers to managing telemetry like a product.
What came next
One intelligence layer, multiple surfaces.
The control-plane foundation later allowed Sawmills to extend beyond the core application into agent-driven workflows across the product, Slack, and GitHub. Rather than designing each surface as a separate experience, I treated them as different expressions of the same contextual system.
Explore the Agent Command Center case study →